Župné mesto Rimavská Sobota 1938 - 1944

According to the first Vienna Arbitration, the southern regions of daily Slovakia, including the city of Rimavská Sobota (in Hungarian Rimaszombat) was ceded to the Hungarian Kingdom in November 1938. After the border changes, the city was classified as a county town. Rimavská Sobota according to the Hungarian census of 1941 was inhabited by approximately 636 Jews who composed about 9% of the town population. The majority of them were murdered during the holocaust. The city was liberated by the Soviet Army on 21 December 1944.

The collection holds the records of the Rimavská Sobota city administration between 1939 and 1944. It contains various files which document Jewish life during WWII at the local level, anti-Jewish measures, the ghettoization and the deportation of the local Jews, as well as the Aryanization of their real estate property and their values between June and December 1944. Researchers might find in the collection the personal files of Jewish tradesmen, documents concerning Jewish associations, as well as inventories of real estate owned by Jewish owners in 1940. Furthermore, many documents on the restrictions of trade and commercial activity of Jews have been preserved too. Another relevant part of the collection concerns Jewish property in 1944. These are mainly petitions of non-Jewish residents who applied for apartments, houses, pharmacies, and stores that belonged to Jews until their deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, while several files hold information about the appointed guardians for the houses of the deported Jewish population. The boxes of the collection are arranged in chronological order. Most of the files about Jewish persecution can be found in boxes number 25 – 32.